Wednesday, August 8, 2012

A “Perfect” Life: Mary Winkler Story

The Big Boom

The drone of an alarm clock roused Mary Winkler awake at 6:15 a.m. on March 22, 2006.

As her preacher husband, Matthew, 31,
lay sleeping, the diminutive woman slipped out of their marital bed and
padded quietly to the bedroom closet at their parsonage in Selmer,
Tenn. There, she withdrew a loaded 12 gauge shotgun from its case.

She walked a few paces back toward the bed and leveled the barrel on her husband’s back.

“The next thing I remember was hearing a
loud boom,” Mary Winkler would later say. “I remember thinking it
wasn’t as loud as I thought it would be. I heard the boom, and he
rolled out of the bed onto the floor.”

It was a brutally efficient shot.
Matthew Winkler took 77 pellets of birdshot that ravaged his sturdy
body, breaking his spine and puncturing several organs.

Matthew Winkler

Yet he was not dead.

He lay on the floor with blood bubbles at his mouth and managed to utter one final word to his wife of 10 years: “Why?”

“I told him that I was sorry and that I loved him,” Mary Winkler said. She dabbed the blood from his mouth with the sheet.

The blast startled the couple’s three young daughters, sleeping in another bedroom in the family’s small home in Selmer, Tenn.

The oldest, Patricia, cautiously crept into her parents’ bedroom to find the source of what she called the “big boom.”

“My daddy was face down on the floor,” the girl said. She heard him groaning, and she asked her mother what had happened.

“I told her daddy was hurt,” Mary Winkler said. “I told her we were leaving.”

Biblical Epic

By the following evening, when Winkler was arrested on the Alabama coast, the case was a full-blown national spectacle.

America wanted an answer to Matthew
Winkler’s last question: Why? Why had this mousey woman used a shotgun
to terminate a seemingly harmonious marriage to her well-regarded
husband?

The college sweethearts seemed to be a
loving, Ken-and-Barbie couple. But from the outset, public opinion
deemed that he must have done something to deserve it—abuse of his wife
or the children, a love affair, homosexuality.

Mary Winkler

Mary Winkler became a presumed victim and Matthew a presumed abuser.

And her clever defense attorneys, Steve
Farese and Leslie Ballin, nurtured that image with a carefully
controlled story line: a demure, angelic woman pushed until she fought
back against a temperamental, perverted, domineering husband.

Steve Farese

The shooting, it seemed, was an act of vengeance of biblical proportion.

That narrative prevailed at trial, where
Mary Winkler mounted the witness stand and abashedly showed jurors—10
of 12 women—the “slutty” platform shoes and hoochie mama wig that
Matthew asked her to wear to bed.

Mrs. Winkler, facing a lifetime behind
bars, instead was convicted of voluntary manslaughter—a kid-gloves
verdict that stunned many observers and delighted Farese, Ballin and
their client.

On June 8, 2007, Judge Weber McCraw
decreed a sentence of 210 days in prison and three years probation. But
he allowed 60 of the days to be served in a mental health facility.
And since she already served 143 days in jail before making bond, the
sentence meant she was would be a free woman after a week in jail and
two months in mental health treatment.

The surprising outcome enhanced the
Winkler case’s reputation as one of the more curious criminal acts
since the seminal spectacle, OJ Simpson.

But left dangling were several questions.

For example, when did it become
appropriate to use a shotgun as a tool of marital dispute resolution,
asks forensic psychologist Dr. Kathy Seifert.

And who will raise the three daughters,
the subject of an upcoming court battle between grandparents Dan and
Diane Winkler, who have temporary custody, and their daughter-in-law?
(On the side, they are suing one another.)

The Winklers have one other question: Where can they go to get their son’s good reputation back?

Perfect

In the weeks after the shooting, friends
and acquaintances used the word “perfect” to describe the relationship
of Matthew and Mary Winkler.

They seemed to live and breathe the
Bible. The Winklers, still a handsome young couple after 10 years of
marriage, had three precious daughters.

Matthew was a beloved “pulpit preacher”
at Fourth Street Church of Christ in Selmer. He was an athletic man who
greeted friends and strangers alike with a toothy smile and a firm
handshake.

Fourth Street Church of Christ, Selmer, Tenn.

Mary was a supportive and well-liked
partner in Matthew’s work. She was about to return to college to
fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a schoolteacher.

They lived with their pet spaniel dog in a brick parsonage on a shady lot not far from the church.

Even Selmer (pop. 4,500), in McNairy
County, seemed just right for the Winklers. They had moved there in
January 2005 when Matthew took the position at Fourth Street Church.

McNairy County, Tenn.

It is the sort of place where people
wear their faith on their sleeves. One McNairy County telephone
directory lists more than 100 churches, but just three taverns.

It was all perfect for the Winklers until that March morning in 2006.

A New Job

On March 21, Mary Winkler worked her very
first day as a substitute teacher in Selmer public schools. Her new
colleagues noticed that she spent an inordinate amount of time while on
break talking on her cell phone.

She rounded up her children after school and went home to the parsonage, where she was met by her husband.

That night, the family watched “Chicken Little” and ate Pizza Hut carryout. The parents tucked the girls into bed at about 8:30.

Winkler Family

Mary and Matthew then revisited a
familiar argument about family finances. The Winklers were broke, like
many young families with a modest income and a nursery full of
children. But the subject had a new urgency.

Mary Winkler, the family’s bookkeeper, had fallen for an Internet scam.

Millions of the scam emails are sent
each year, most seeking some form of good faith deposit from the victim
in exchange for the promise of a huge payoff. The concept has been
around for centuries and is known in the confidence rackets as the
advance-fee fraud.

It is known in Africa as the 419 scheme,
for the Nigerian law that bans it. Many of the scammers live in Festac
Town, Nigeria, outside the capital of Lagos. They call themselves
“yahoo-yahoo boys” because many have Yahoo accounts.

Like any financial scam, the success of
the 419 scheme depends upon the greed of its victims. Those who bite
are drawn into a more elaborate scheme.

The scammers gain the trust of a victim
by wiring a small deposit into his bank account. Soon, the victim is
drawn into a check-kiting or money-laundering operation that involves
deposits and wire transfers of stolen or altered checks from
third-party accounts.

Mary Winkler was deeply involved in the scam.

Through wire transfers, she had
deposited two fraudulent checks—one from Canada, one from
Nigeria—totaling $17,500 in family accounts, then shifted some of the
funds to a second bank in the shell game known as check kiting.

She had withdrawn $500 cash by the time bank officials caught on.

That is why she spent so much time on
the phone on March 21. Two Tennessee banks, Regions Bank in Selmer and
First State Bank in Henderson, were demanding to know Mary Winkler’s
role in the 419 scheme.

She was never completely forthcoming in explaining her involvement.

“I’d gotten a call from the bank, and we
were having troubles, mostly my fault. Bad bookkeeping,” she would
later say. Referring to her husband, she added, “He was upset with me
about that.”

(Attorney Farese claimed Matthew Winkler
was involved, as well. “As a family they were being conned,” Farese
said. “The information we have is that he was aware of the checks…and
knew about where they were being deposited.”)

The argument escalated from there, by her account.

Matthew Winkler

“Matthew started ranting about problems
he was having and personal feelings about the church administration,”
she said. “I didn’t know what set him off. I was just listening to him.
He calmed down. We started the movie, and I fell asleep. He woke me
up. We went to bed…I remember not sleeping well.”

But she said there were other problems that seemed to culminate that night.

“I was upset at him because he had
really been on me lately, criticizing me for things, the way I walk,
the way I eat, everything. It was just building up to this point. I was
just tired of it. I guess I just got to a point and snapped.”

To the Beach

The following morning, as Matthew lay
drawing his final breaths, Mary Winkler herded her daughters into the
family’s minivan and drove away. She packed nothing, although she did
take along the shotgun.

She lied in telling her eldest daughter—concerned about Matthew’s well-being—that help for him was on the way.

She drove that evening to Jackson,
Miss., staying at a Fairfield Inn, and then continued the next morning
to a Sleep Inn on the Gulf of Mexico in Orange Beach, Ala., a popular
regional vacation destination.

“The only reason I headed towards
(Orange Beach) is that I wanted to take them to the beach and play with
them as long as I could,” Mary Winkler later said. “I planned on
coming (back) when we were through. I knew I would be caught…I didn’t
tell the girls the truth that I had shot Daddy. I said he was in the
hospital, just anything to make up him not being with us.”

She paid for hotel rooms, gas and food
with cash from the $500 she had withdrawn. She did not use credit cards
and did not phone anyone.

Matthew Winkler was found dead by church
members about 15 hours after he was shot, when he failed to show up for
his regular Wednesday night prayer meeting.

Orange Beach police personnel entertained
the daughters, Patricia, then 8; Allie, 6, and Brianna, 1. The girls,
described by police as bright and inquisitive, were turned over to the
custody of Dan and Diane Winkler.

Mary Winkler’s demeanor at arrest and
her police mug shot appeared to indicate depression, repressed
feelings, shock or some combination of each.

Police were puzzled by her lack of emotional reaction as she was being taken into custody for slaying her husband.

“There were no tears shed that I know
of,” said Greg Duck, assistant police chief in Orange Beach. The
arresting officer said the woman seemed “relieved.”

Greg Duck

Tennessee police drove to Orange Beach
and interviewed Mrs. Winkler after midnight. With folksy language, she
calmly and precisely explained what she had done and why.

She said she had accepted abuse from her husband “like a mouse” for many years. Then she said, her “ugly came out.”

In her statement to police, Winkler said
she had been beaten down by her husband over “stupid stuff” until she
was bullied to the brink of insanity.

“I love him dearly, but gosh, he just nailed me in the ground,” she said, “and I was real good for quite, quite some time.”

Mary Winkler

Police and prosecutors said the
statement indicated that she had given the killing some forethought,
and this apparent premeditation brought a first-degree murder charge.

Winkler agreed to return to Tennessee,
where she waived her right a preliminary hearing, based on advice from
her Dixie dream team of Memphis lawyers, Farese and Ballin.

They agreed to take the case without
retainer—at least initially. A cynical view is that they agreed to work
free in exchange for the priceless publicity that the case brought.

But Farese said he did it as a favor to Memphis attorney Mike Cook, a cousin of Mary Winkler.

Born in Knoxville

Mary Winkler was born Mary Carol Freeman
in 1974 in Knoxville, a city of 200,000 located in the western lap of
the Appalachian Mountains in eastern Tennessee.

She and her parents, Clark and Mary Nell
Freeman, lived on Frontier Trail, in a modestly affluent neighborhood
in southwest Knoxville, where the city fades into farm fields. Census
statistics indicate the Freemans’ ZIP code is 94 percent white, with an
average home value of $100,000 and average household income of
$42,000—both well above the Tennessee average.

Mary’s mother was a teacher, and her
father worked in real estate as a house flipper. He bought rundown
properties at bargain-basement rates, then renovated and resold them.

The Freeman family attended Laurel Church
of Christ in Knoxville, a 200-family congregation known for its campus
ministry at the University of Tennessee. Clark Freeman served as a
deacon at Laurel.

Laurel Church of Christ in Knoxville, Tenn.

The family suffered a loss when younger
daughter Patricia, a quadriplegic, died during a seizure when Mary was 8
years old. Not long after the girl died, the Freemans adopted five
children, two boys and three girls from the same family.

When she was young, Mary went by her middle name, Carol, perhaps to differentiate from her mother, Mary Nell.

She graduated in 1992 from South-Doyle High School, part of the Knoxville public school system.

She spent the 1992-93 academic year at
Nashville’s David Lipscomb University, a flagship college for Churches
of Christ believers, then transferred the following year to
Freed-Hardeman University, another Churches of Christ affiliate in
Henderson, Tenn., 20 miles north of Selmer.

Mary Winkler, college

Mary met Matthew Winkler at the school, where Matthew’s father worked as an adjunct professor.

Family Business: Faith

Religion was the Winklers’ family business.

Matthew’s paternal grandfather, Wendell
Winkler, was a fire-and-brimstone evangelist who preached in the
southeast for more than 50 years. His father, Dan, was a peripatetic
Church of Christ minister and mother, Diane, a teacher. The couple has
two other sons, Dan Jr. and Jacob.

The family moved frequently, following Dan Sr. from one church position to the next.

Matthew graduated from Austin High
School in Decatur, Ala., where his father was a preacher at Beltline
Church of Christ. Tall, handsome and fit, Matthew was a sports star at
Austin High, and he continued to stand out in college.

Freed-Hardeman is a venerable Christian
university with a picture-postcard campus set on a hill in Henderson, a
small city in western Tennessee.

Freed-Hardeman Univ.

The school has 2,000 students who major
in business, education, Bible study, fine arts or science and math.
About two-thirds of the students are from Tennessee. The student body
is overwhelmingly white, and 9 in 10 are Church of Christ members,
according to the school’s student profiles.

The university’s website describes an
austere student lifestyle at Freed-Hardeman, particularly when compared
with non-religious colleges.

Matthew Winkler

For example, the student handbook
mandates “modesty and appropriateness” in fashion and grooming. A
strict midnight curfew is enforced. Students are required to attend
daily chapel service, and dormitories are segregated by gender.

The university website notes:

“Halloween provides a unique activity on campus. Students are allowed to trick-or-treat
in dorms of the opposite sex. This is the only time during the school
year when members of the opposite sex are allowed to visit each other’s
dorms beyond the lobbies.”

Yet a classmate of Mary and Matthew
Winkler told the Crime Library that the school was less restrictive in
practice than it might seem on paper.

“Life Was Good”

Elizabeth Gentle

“Life was good there,” said Elizabeth Gentle, 32, a native of Haileyville, Ala. “It was a lot of fun.”

Gentle transferred to the school in
1994, the same year as Mary Freeman. They went through orientation
together, and she remained friendly throughout the year with Mary, whom
she recalled as a tiny young woman with long brunette tresses.

“She was a nice girl,” Gentle said. “She
was quiet. She was unassuming. She had a pretty smile on her face. She
was easy to get along with. I sat next to her in Bible class, and she
always had a good attitude. She was willing to socialize, and she could
be funny. She just had a sweet spirit about her. I can’t say anything
bad about her.”

Mary Freeman was a member of the campus
Evangelism Forum, and she was active in Phi Kappa Alpha, one of six
campus social clubs. (Despite Greek names, the clubs are not associated
with traditional sororities and fraternities.)

Gentle also was acquainted with Matthew Winkler, whom she recalled as always wearing “an infectious smile.”

Gentle went on to become a broadcast journalist, and she has worked for the past six years for WAFF-TV in Huntsville, Ala.

She said it did not immediately sink in that the minister killed in Tennessee had been her old Freed-Hardeman classmate.

And when she realized that the alleged perpetrator was the demure former Mary Freeman, “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

Gentle covered the story for her
station, watching in the Selmer courtroom as her old college friend was
led in wearing orange prison scrubs.

Mary Winkler

She was not the same woman, Gentle said.
Her hair was shorn, and her dull expression was not that of the lively
coed she had known a decade ago.

“To me she has a different look on her face now than she did then,” Gentle said. “It just seems blank.”

Mary Freeman and Matthew Winkler were
married in 1996 in a backyard ceremony at Mary’s family home in
Knoxville, with Clark Freeman presiding. They returned to
Freed-Hardeman, but financial considerations forced the young couple to
leave college in 1997 after Mary got pregnant, according to a former
classmate.

The young couple settled in Nashville,
where Matthew completed his Bible study degree while working as a youth
minister at the Bellevue Church of Christ congregation.

Daughter Patricia — named after Mary’s
late sister — arrived in October 1997, followed three years later by
Mary Alice, known as Allie. Between the two births, the family suffered
the loss of Mary’s mother to cancer.

Mary became estranged from her father at about the time of that death, although she was in contact with her adopted siblings.

Matthew Winkler next took a job teaching
Bible classes at Boyd Christian School, another Church of Christ
affiliate, in McMinnville, in middle Tennessee.

“Matt had it all,” the principal there,
Eva Ferrell, told Woody Baird of the Associated Press. “He was
handsome. He was full of personality. He was smart. But most
importantly he had a good, Christian soul.”

Move to Selmer

The year 2005 brought more changes for the Winklers.

In March, about a year after suffering a
miscarriage, Mary gave birth prematurely to the couple’s third
daughter, Brianna. The newborn was cared for at a hospital in
Nashville, 150 miles from home, which led to many car trips back and
forth.

Meanwhile, in January 2005 Matthew had
taken a job as pulpit preacher at Fourth Street Church of Christ in
Selmer, the McNairy County seat.

McNairy County, Tenn.

McNairy, in southwest Tennessee near the
Mississippi border, is best known as the home of Buford Pusser, the
stick-toting sheriff whose life was portrayed in a series of three
films in the 1970s. Pusser, just 26 when he was elected sheriff in
1964, won a reputation as an uncompromising foe of crimes high and low,
and he set about cleaning up the vice, gambling and corruption.

Buford Pusser

It is not easy to square McNairy’s “Walking Tall” reputation for lawlessness with actual police reports.

DVD Cover: Walking Tall (1974 release)

Homicide is rare in the county, which
has a population of 25,000. In 2003, the county reported a total of
just 28 violent crimes, none of them murders.

McNairy County, named for a 19th century Nashville judge, is poor, 93 percent white and relatively uneducated.

About one in six residents live in
poverty. Just 9 percent of residents have a four-year college degree,
compared with about 18 percent of all Tennessee residents and nearly a
quarter of the U.S. population.

But what it lacks in education McNairy makes up for in fervent faith.

Among its more than 100 churches,
McNairy County counts 18 affiliates of the Churches of Christ and 30
Southern Baptist congregations. Selmer has about 30 churches.

Some believe the Winklers’ faith was a subscript to the spousal homicide.

The Churches of Christ use a literal
reading of the Bible for its creed. Nearly all leadership positions are
held by men. Women are subservient–said to be decreed in the Apostle
Paul’s epistle that wives must submit to their husbands.

The old-fashioned church practices full-immersion adult Baptism, and it forbids the use of musical instruments during services.

Churches of Christ regard themselves not
as a denomination but as a network of like-minded autonomous
congregations, each governed by its own slate of elders. (They are not
related to the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant
denomination.)

The elders are assisted by deacons, who
often have responsibility for practical matters, such as buildings and
grounds. The religious leader at a Churches of Christ affiliate
typically is called “evangelist” or “pulpit preacher”–the position that
Matthew Winkler held.

The faith is deeply rooted in Tennessee,
where two influential adherents, Tolbert Fanning and David Lipscomb,
lived and preached.

The fundamentalist faith has grown
slowly but steadily. It now counts about 3 million adherents in the
United States and has affiliate churches around the world.

Tennessee remains a Church of Christ stronghold, with more than 400 congregations.

Missed Signs?

Most members of the Fourth Street Church
say they did not see signs that Mary and Matthew Winkler were having
problems. Some wonder whether they missed warning signs.

“I wish I had,” said one woman. “A lot of us are feeling a little guilty.”

Dr. Judy Kuriansky, a professor of
clinical psychology at Columbia University, noted that ministers and
their wives live a fishbowl lifestyle.

Dr. Judy Kuriansky

“There’s no question, as we now well
know, that people of the cloth have secrets,” she told the Crime
Library. “Religiosity can have dark sides. We don’t like to think about
that. We like to think that members of the clergy are only pure in
their motivations.”

Typically, Kuriansky said, a violent act
such as the Winkler murder is precipitated by a final “grand insult”
that tops off some festering problem.

“The dimensions of a good relationship
include compromise and communication,” said Kuriansky, author of “The
Complete Idiot’s Guide to a Healthy Relationship.” “When you don’t
compromise and communicate, things build up over time.”

She said shrinks called it “gunny-sacking”: Problems are hidden in a metaphorical burlap bag that becomes an increasing burden.

Kuriansky said ministers rarely seek
help for personal problems because they fear they could lose their job
if they admit to being less than perfect.

As one minister’s spouse put it, “Until
someone has walked in the shoes of a pastor’s wife, they have no idea
what kind of pressures and unrealistic expectations are often put on
them.”

Coincidentally, one of those who stepped
forward to speak about the dynamics of clergy marriages was Gayle
Haggard, whose husband, Ted, was a nationally known fundamentalist
preacher in Colorado Springs.

Haggard told a reporter that women like
Mary Winkler feel pressure “to live a certain way, to dress a certain
way, for their children to behave a certain way.”

Eight months later, Haggard resigned
after admitting to using methamphetamines and a having a long
relationship with a gay prostitute.

Bailed Out

In August 2006, after five months behind
bars, Mary Winkler posted $750,000 bail with help from her father, who
mortgaged his property.

She moved to McMinnville, Tenn., to live with Kathy Thomsen, an old church friend.

Soon after Mary’s release, her defense team began to press its abused-spouse narrative in the court of public opinion.

Mary Winkler

First came a profile of Mary Winkler in the November 2006 issue of Glamour magazine.

Her attorneys agreed to allow her to
pose for photos, including one featuring her crucifix necklace. Her
father and siblings offered testimony to the woman’s saintly nature
while castigating Winkler for obsessing on money and holding Mary under
his thumb.

Clark Freeman, Mary’s father, added
elusive references indicating that his estrangement with his daughter
was related to some unspeakable abuse at the hands of Matthew.

Attorney Farese picked up on that theme.

“Only Mary can talk about his temper and
how controlling he was,” he told the Glamour reporter. “God and
Matthew Winkler: These were the two figures she served…Mary did not
know up from down and was literally trapped.”

Steve Farese

At about the time the magazine article
was published, Mary Winkler’s support team appeared on ABC’s “Good
Morning America,” where they again made accusations of Matthew’s
abuse—verbal, mental, physical, sexual.

The television spot served as a dress-rehearsal for the defense argument at trial.

One friend said she saw Mary with a black eye, and another said the woman cowered before her husband.

“I saw bad bruises,” said Clark Freeman.
“The heaviest of makeup covering facial bruises. So one day, I
confronted her. I said, ‘Mary Carol, you are coming off as a much
abused wife, very battered’…(She) would hang her head and say, ‘No,
daddy, everything’s all right.’”

“There are all kinds of abuse imaginable
that will be talked about at the trial,” added attorney Ballin. “What
went on behind their closed doors is going to have to be told.”

There was just one brief diversion from this storyline.

On New Year’s Eve 2006, Mary Winkler was
spotted smoking and drinking at a McMinnville bar. A customer captured
her on a cell phone video, and the footage aired on local TV.

Trial Time

Prosecutors tried several times to
negotiate a guilty plea. Farese and Ballin said they declined several
offers—even after prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty
against Winkler.

Prosecutor Walt Freeland went to trial seeking a first-degree murder conviction and a 51-year sentence.

Trial observers judged that the
prosecution was outflanked by the nimble defense team. Farese and
Ballin managed to mold testimony to fit their abuse-spouse narrative,
and the prosecutors were lousy counter-punchers.

Mary Winkler

The preacher’s wife may have been saved from life in prison even before testimony began.

“This trial shows once again that the
most important part of any trial is the jury selection,” Michael
Mendelson, a longtime New York criminal defense attorney, told the
Crime Library. “The OJ Simpson case proved that, and this case proved
it again. If you get the right jury, you win. If you don’t get the
right jury, you lose.”

Farese and Ballin seated a jury with 10
women and two men. During three days of jury selection, the attorneys
closely questioned potential jurors about spousal abuse. Among their
queries:

“Can emotional abuse be as damaging as physical abuse?”

“Have you ever talked to someone who didn’t listen?”

“Have you ever wondered why someone would stay in an abusive relationship?”

Even in jury selection, they were molding Mary as an empathetic figure overwhelmed by years of abuse.

“This was a southern jury filled with
southern women,” Mendelson said. “Even today, some southern women are
born into a heritage of deference to their husbands. You might have had
10 women sitting on that jury who have experienced the same sort of
thing, and here they are judging one woman who had the balls to do
something about her situation. They may have been saying, ‘Aha, it’s
get-even time.’”

The conventional wisdom is that women
jurors are tougher than men on women defendants, but the defense
attorneys obviously saw something in this particular jury that
prosecutor Freeland did not.

Heartbreaking Testimony

The Winklers’ oldest child, Patricia,
then a fourth-grader, appeared as a prosecution witness, giving brief
but heartbreaking testimony that often left the child, her mother, many
jurors and spectators in tears.

Prosecutor Freeland asked whether
Matthew had been a good father, and the child softly replied, “Yes,
sir.” Asked whether he had ever been “ugly” with her mother, she
responded, “No, sir.”

The girl, dressed in a black-and-white
polka dot dress, said she and her sisters were startled awake by a “big
boom or something” on the morning of the slaying. She said she crept
into her parents’ bedroom and found her father on the floor groaning.

Winkler Family

Her mother, she said, “was just walking around, and she saw us and closed the door…Me and Allie was scared.”

The child said she has seen her mother only once since her arrest.

“I didn’t want to see her,” she said. “I mean, I still love her, I just don’t want to.”

Matthew’s mother, Diane, later testified
that during the children’s first visit with Mary, she told them that
she had not killed Matthew. She indicated that both she and the
children were angered by what they saw as a bald-faced lie.

‘Slutty’ Shoes

During the trial, Mary Winkler seemed to
have regained some of the spark that college friends said was missing
from the emotionally blank young woman displayed in her arrest mug
shots.

She dressed conservatively but with modest flair, and she was clearly engaged by the proceedings.

Her trial testimony proved key, although it was hardly the X-rated subject matter that Ballin had hinted at.

She revealed that her husband pressed
her to engage in oral and anal sex, which she viewed as unnatural. She
said he insisted that she dress up “slutty” in an Afro wig, miniskirts
and footwear fit for a hooker.

Mary Winkler

In a brilliant show-and-tell gambit,
defense attorneys Farese and Ballin entered the wig and shoes into
evidence. During her testimony, Winkler shyly gripped one of the white
platform shoes by its eight-inch stiletto heel.

Any defense that calls a defendant to the witness stand is taking a risk. But it paid off in this case.

Farese and Ballin used the boilerplate
defense for gunshot cases: Their client was holding the gun, but she
did not mean to use it.

Winkler admitted that she pointed a
shotgun at her husband’s back but said she did not intend to pull the
trigger. She indicated she was in a state of near delirium over their
marriage. Their checking account was overdrawn by $5,000, and she was
under pressure from Matthew over the check-kiting scheme.

Matthew Winkler

When the gun “accidentally” fired, she said, her instinct was to flee. She packed up her daughters and drove to the beach.

“All I knew was that the stupid gun had
went off, and nobody would believe me and they would just take my girls
away from me,” she testified.

Winkler said she had suffered silently
through years of sexual, physical and psychological abuse. She demurely
reviewed Matthew’s sexual tastes—including internet pornography as a
prelude to sex—and said he had punched and kicked her.

It was a classic abused-spouse defense.

Yet, during her initial statement to
police after she was arrested, Mary specifically said that Matthew had
not abused her in any way.

Why had she changed her story?

“I was ashamed,” she said. “I didn’t want anybody to know about Matthew.”

It seemed like a crucial contradiction
on which the prosecution could capitalize. But prosecutor Freeland let
the opportunity slip by.

The defense offered some corroborating
evidence — two people who witnessed Matthew’s temper; the friends who
saw Mary’s black eye and watched her cower when she was in her
husband’s presence.

During his presentation of evidence,
Freeland attempted to focus attention on the Internet scam and the
couple’s financial problems. He was able to land a few jabs but never a
knockout punch.

Freeland later insisted that Matthew
Winkler was “a good daddy who didn’t abuse anybody.” But defense
attorney Farese countered, “If you look up spousal abuse in the
dictionary, you’re going to see Mary Winkler’s picture.”

The Conviction

After a three-week trial, the jury
deliberated for eight hours on March 22 before announcing the verdict to
a hushed Selmer courtroom: Mary Winkler was judged guilty of voluntary
manslaughter.

Under Tennessee law, voluntary
manslaughter is a crime of passion “produced by adequate provocation
sufficient to lead a reasonable person to act in an irrational manner.”

There was no reaction in the courtroom
to the verdict, even though it was filled with the loved ones of both
Matthew and Mary Winkler.

Later, after Judge McCraw dismissed the jurors, Mary Winkler hugged her attorneys, her father and other kin in the courtroom.

The prosecution team, disappointed by the verdict, issued a statement expressing condolences to Matthew Winkler’s family.

After the trial’s conclusion, defense attorney Farese revealed that Mary Winkler had turned down three plea bargains.

“We were offered 35 years,” Farese said.
“We were offered 20 years. We were offered 15 years. We’re now looking
at three to six years. My reaction is the verdict was most probably
just.”

“There are no winners,” added Ballin.
“We’re left with the memory of Matthew Winkler. And even though there
have been a lot of negative things said about him in this trial, there
was a good side to him, too. You heard that from Mary, ‘He could be so
good at times.’ This is a case about two people who had a tumultuous
marriage of some 10 years that ended in tragedy. Nothing good about
it.”

210 Days for a Life

Because she was a first-time felon, Mary
Winkler faced a sentence range of three to six years when she stood
before Judge McCraw to get her comeuppance. He also had the discretion
to order probation.

During a five-hour sentencing hearing,
Freeland argued for the maximum six-year sentence. Farese and Ballin
argued for probation.

Mary Winkler, who was among the 10
people who testified, read a statement that seemed disingenuous: She
rued the loss of the man she killed.

“I’ve suffered the loss of someone I
loved,” she said. “I’ve lost my freedom. I’ve lost my children, and
I’ve had my life be put on public display. I think of Matthew every
day, and the guilt, and I always miss him and love him.”

Mary Winkler

She said acknowledged there were
both good and bad times in the marriage, “And I wish I could have that
good Matthew, and we could live together forever…I hope this situation
sheds light on unhealthy relationships, and that others will find the
strength and have the courage to seek help before such a tragedy occurs
again.”

McCraw received 90 letters of
recommendation written on Winkler’s behalf. His 25-minute long
sentencing edict, which he recited from a written script, included no
chastising words about the defendant.

McCraw said the offense made Winkler
eligible for prison since it met the state’s legal definition of a
“violent, shocking and reprehensible” act. But he added, “In fashioning
this sentence, the court has considered the seriousness of the
offense, the jury’s verdict and the testimony about allegations of
abuse of the defendant.”

The sentence—210 days, minus the 143
already served and 60 days in a mental facility—once again brought mute
reaction in the courtroom.

Mary Winkler simply bowed her head and closed her eyes for about 20 seconds, as if in prayer.

“I’m quite happy,” Farese said outside court. “I think in the end he (Judge McCraw) did what was right.”

Foreman Speaks

Outside court before the sentencing
hearing, jury foreman Bill Berry gave Court TV an unusually blunt
assessment of the trial and his fellow jurors.

He said the jury leaned heavily in favor of Mrs. Winkler due to the “10 ladies” seated on the jury.

“I don’t think justice was done,” said Berry. “It’s the times we’re living in. People are getting away with murder today.”

He called the gender makeup of the jury “unbalanced” and “unfair.”

He said that after the first seven hours
of deliberations, nine of the 10 women appeared ready to vote for
acquittal. They “wanted her to just walk free,” Berry said.

He said the verdict of voluntary manslaughter was a compromise.

“We had to settle on something,” he said.

Berry said he believed Winkler was “not
completely” truthful when she testified to physical, sexual and mental
abuse at the hands of her husband. He said he doubted the physical
abuse and was not sure about sexual abuse, but he conceded there may
have been mental abuse.

Berry said he had hoped Judge McCraw
would sentence Winkler to the maximum time in prison, and he said she
“doesn’t deserve” to regain custody of her daughters.

Withering Words

There are lingering legal issues surrounding the slaying.

Fights lie ahead between Mary Winkler
and her in-laws. Diane and Dan Winkler filed a $2 million wrongful
death civil suit against her, and they are seeking permanent custody of
their three grandchildren.

The Winklers are trying to terminate
Mary’s parental rights, and she responded with a petition to seek
immediate custody. The case is pending in Chancery Court in Jackson,
Tenn.

Mary Winkler

The most riveting moments in the
sentencing hearing came during victim impact statements given by the
Matthew Winkler’s brother and mother. After initially expressing love
and support for their daughter-in-law, Winkler family has had an
increasingly contentious relationship with her.

“I’ve watched as the life of my brother
has been turned into a circus,” testified Dan Winkler Jr. While
starting icily at his sister-in-law, he added, “I don’t see any
remorse.”

Most withering was the testimony of the victim’s mother, Diane Winkler.

“You broke your girls’ hearts,” Mrs.
Winkler said during a stern 30-minute monologue in which she stared
intently at Mary Winkler, who sat wearing a print dress and white
sweater. “Mary, you have destroyed your husband’s character. You have
destroyed his good name…You have accused him of being a monster who
abused and belittled you.

Was It Justice?

Tom Flowers watched the Winkler story unfold with keen interest.

A Tennessean, he attended the same
college as the Winklers, was raised in their denomination and had met
Matthew’s preacher grandfather, Wendell.

He said the prosecution strategy that sought a murder conviction and long sentence was flawed.

“I was just stunned when the
prosecution was pressing for a conviction of premeditated, first-degree
murder,” he said. “So when the verdict came out, I was satisfied that
justice had been served.”

But was it justice?

A few months after the slaying, when the
motive in the case was still a mystery, Jennifer Johnson, a
spokeswoman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, made a prescient
comment when contacted by Crime Library.

Tennesse Bureau of Investigation

“At the end of the day, this probably
won’t make much more sense to the public than it does right now,”
Johnson said. She added, “I think most people will be thinking…’I just
don’t get it.’”

Perhaps the outcome was a form of
backlash against the clergy after two decades of scandals among
Catholic and Protestant denominations. Perhaps it was payback after
generations of the dirty little secret of spousal abuse.

But Dr. Kathy Seifert, the forensic
psychotherapist, said there are unanswered questions about Mary
Winkler’s “massive overreaction” to whatever marital problems the
couple might have been having.

“My suspicion is that someone who uses
violence as a means of a resolving domestic problem has a model of that
violence, abuse or neglect somewhere in her background,” Seifert said.

Mary Winkler

She said the profile of Mary Winkler
presented in her defense narrative seemed to fit the classic profile of
a “hot” violent female. These often are passive victims of abuse who
“get to the point where they can’t take it anymore, and something
snaps, and they finally seek their revenge.”

Seifert added that the kinky sex angle doesn’t seem to ring true.

“I can see a very conservative lady not
exposed to the world very much becoming very, very upset and
psychologically damaged by that,” she said. “But when it comes to
killing somebody over something like that, it feels like there’s a
piece of information missing—some other component that causes the
massive overreaction. Maybe it’s an insurance policy. Maybe it’s
childhood abuse. Maybe it’s something else.”

3 comments:

What people need to understand about people who are abused is that the person who is abused usually loves the other person. I am the child of a mother who was abused by my father. I saw it all my life, he would get angry, he would yell, he would hit, he tried not to leave marks…..but if he did Mom would say, "she fell and hit the table or door." She had broken arms, and lots of bruises……..but the funny thing is that when Dad wanted to he was the nicest person and all of the people who knew him thought he was great. So, yes I do believe that she could have been an abused wife and no one would have known……my Mom wasn't told me when I was young that, "she loved my father but did not like him." As a child I could not understand that….but when I was older I understood it well…..as I too "loved him but did not like him."

One on one with Mary Winkler: A WAFF 48 News special reportPostler.ed: May 26, 2010 3:40 PM CDT

ifferent world these days for Mary Wink

She's renting a home in Smithville, Tennessee and raising her three daughters.

"This is wonderful, just having the land. And the girls will get out in there and will run and they enjoy that," said Winkler of her daughters, Patricia, Ally, and Brianna.

Winkler says they're always looking to pitch in around the house.

"They understand they need to do a little bit more around the house, they need to help out and they've done a great job," said Winkler.

Winkler says she needs that help now that she is dealing with a new obstacle in her life. She's been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

"It was such a scary time. At one point we thought I had a stroke just because the disabilities were on the right side of my body," she explained.

The diagnosis threw Winkler for a loop just when she thought her life was beginning to settle down.

She'd regained custody of her three girls in 2008, a year after her conviction for her husband Matthew's shooting death.

Winkler served less than 300 days behind bars and she also had to get mental health treatment.

With that past her, she focused on making a better life for her girls, going back to school and getting a job.

She says that goal seems much harder to reach now that she's been diagnosed with a disease that has no known cure.

"I had just been accepted into nursing school last fall. I talked to my physical therapist and my occupational therapist and the problem, she said nursing would not be an occupation to go into because I'm on my feet so much," said Winkler.

Winkler is getting help and support from family and friends. Even the parents of her slain husband, the couple she battled in court for custody of her children, have pitched in to help with her girls.

"When I had the aspiration with my MS, it was a real hard time. The Winklers were wonderful because the girls had gone for a weekend visit and that turned into three months. So the Winklers were just right there for the girls and took great care of them," she explained.

As for the shotgun blast that day in march four years ago, Mary Winkler says she hopes her actions won't affect how people treat her girls.

"Whatever reason people have any problem with me, that's fine. Everybody's entitled to their opinion, but these girls are treated for who they are, not because of what their mother's done," said Winkler. "They're three very fine young ladies."

Winkler says she's not working right now, but she says her family has clothes on their backs and food on the table. She says she's grateful to her former in-laws for having taken such good care of her girls.